Recently by Gary North: Obama Won. Now What Will You Do?
Ray Kurzweill invented the technology that reads text and converts it into spoken language.
His article on the revolution in online college education points to the future.
How will some struggling private college with under 1,000 students compete? How will it get parents to shell out $35,000 a year?
The higher education oligopoly is about to get broken.
Take the classes online. Get the degree from an online accredited university for $15,000.
Education is about to change dramatically, says Anant Agarwal, who heads edX, a $60 million MIT-Harvard effort to stream a college education over the Web, free, with plans to teach a billion students, Technology Review reports.
“Massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, offered by new education ventures like edX, Coursera, and Udacity, to name the most prominent (see “The Crisis in Higher Education”) will affect markets so large that their value is difficult to quantify.
A quarter of the American population, 80 million people, is enrolled in K–12 education, college, or graduate school. Direct expenditures by government exceed $800 billion. Add to that figure private education and corporate training.
At edX, Agarwal says, the same three-person team of a professor plus assistants that used to teach analog circuit design to 400 students at MIT now handles 10,000 online and could take a hundred times more.
Coursera, an alliance between Stanford and two dozen other schools, claims that it had 1.5 million students sign up.
Changing the world
The rise of the MOOCs means we can begin thinking about how free, top-quality education could change the world.
Khan’s videos are popular in India, and the MOOC purveyors have found that 60 percent of their sign-ups are self-starters from knowledge-hungry nations like Brazil and China. Nobody knows what a liberal application of high-octane educational propellant might do. Will it supersize innovation globally by knocking away barriers to good instruction? Will frightened governments censor teachers as they have the Web?
For more details, click the link.
Continue Reading on www.kurzweilai.net
November 9, 2012
Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com. He is also the author of a free 31-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible.
Copyright © 2012 Gary North
